Despite the obvious CO2/warming reasons, wouldn't these research vessels/cruise ships cause more ice melt as well? (Breaking up the ice causing faster melt)
Are you insinuating that these ships are a driving force in inhibiting the formation of ice, that the lack of ice will be beneficial to these routes, or some other thought that I'm not seeing?
> On its maiden voyage, the innovative tanker used its integral icebreaker to cross ice fields 1.2m thick, passing along the northern sea section of the route in the Russian Arctic in a record six-and-a-half days.
I wonder if this has an appreciable effect on further ice melt. The tanker cuts a huge swath through the ice, increasing it's surface area and allowing it to drift off and melt faster. It's like an anthropic feedback effect.
I wonder how all these pieces of plastic in the ice will affect its melting temperature and it's strength. There is a good research paper there with data that could affect estimates on freeze and melt rates of winter ice, formulas used to calculate when ice packs start to break up, ship hull strength requirements for different depths of ice, etc.
The think the new Sir David Attenborough polar research ship has this feature (though I may be getting confused with a different vessel, an icebreaker I might have seen described on YouTube) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54597767
I vaguely remember reading that there were shipping routes that would be half the time and distance if the ice was melted... And some ships run during the summer months... Mostly from Russia to Europe... Iirc...
Maybe. The -125C ice could melt faster if it and its container shatters into a billion pieces (a real risk if it’s dropped), massively increasing its surface area.
1. It's much easier to deliver a small quantity of stable and energy-dense fuel, versus delivering a larger bulky mass thermally-below-equilibrium ice that'll be gradually heating up the whole time.
2. Enough ice for transport doesn't mean enough ice for longer-term storage.
That's really fascinating. The boat sounds almost like a mobile version of the huge wall of ice in Game of Thrones. I could see this used to construct space stations and vehicles, to be used where the vacuum of space prevented thawing.
Ice breakers often get stuck in ice more so than any other ship they can clear only very thin surface ice basically they are used to clear the ice which is too thin for supply ships to offload onto so they clear a path towards the thicker ice shelf or land.
From the linked article: The idea for a ship made of ice impressed the United States and Canada enough that a 60-foot (18 m)-long, 1,000-ton ship was built in one month on Patricia Lake in the Canadian Rockies.
reply